Play Learning and Montessori Education

[Pages:30]Playful Learning and Montessori Education

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Angeline S. Lillard

Although Montessori education is often considered a form of playful learning, Maria Montessori herself spoke negatively about a major component of playful learning--pretend play, or fantasy--for young children. In this essay, the author discusses this apparent contradiction: how and why Montessori education includes elements of playful learning while simultaneously eschewing fantasy. She concludes with a discussion of research on the outcomes of Montessori education and on pretend-play research, clarifying how Montessori education relates to playful learning. Key words: didactic education: Montessori education: playful learning; preschool; pretend play

In recent years, educators have begun using the didactic teaching methods

appropriate for older children in preschool settings (Zigler and Bishop-Josef 2004). Increasingly, we see children ages three to five expected to sit and listen to lessons without interacting (Hamre and Pianta 2007). Such an approach to learning belies the principles of constructivism that much research on human learning shows to be effective. In fact, many educators now call for one constructivist approach in particular, playful learning, as a developmentally appropriate alternative to didactic instruction (Fisher et al. 2011)--as a way to help preschoolers learn in the ways they naturally learn. Along a line running from free play (in which children play independently), through guided play (where an adult oversees and gently directs--or scaffolds--their play), to didactic instruction (where a teacher directly instructs children), playful learning occupies the span between free play and guided play.

As described by Fisher et al., free play includes object play, pretend and sociodramatic play, and rough-and-tumble play, in all of which children engage without close adult oversight or control. Free play is fun, flexible, active, and voluntary (i.e. without extrinsic reward). Free play also often includes elements of make-believe and also often involves peers. Guided play occurs when an adult aims a child towards specific knowledge in a playful, fun, and relaxed way.

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American Journal of Play, volume 5, number 2 ? The Strong Contact Angeline S. Lillard at aslzh@virginia.edu

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Guided play often involves specific toys with which a child can interact to gain knowledge. A supervising adult observes the child closely and asks questions to help the child learn but, as with free play, respects the child's own interests and pacing. In contrast, didactic instruction is teacher centered and teacher paced and more likely to involve listening to words rather than working with objects. We commonly associate didactic instruction with school, although today's teachereducation courses seldom extol its methods.

Again, playful learning spans both free play and guided play. Playful learning is child centered, constructivist, affectively positive, and hands-on. It can involve fantasy but does not necessarily do so. At the guided-play end of the playful-learning span, "teachers might enhance children's exploration and learning by commenting on their discoveries, co-playing along with the children, asking open-ended questions about what children are finding, or exploring the materials in ways that children might not have thought to do" (Weisberg, Hirsch-Pasek, and Golinkoff, in press). Recent meta-analyses suggests that more directed forms of "discovery learning" are optimal (relative to pure discovery learning and didactic instruction) and consistent with the idea that playful learning is an excellent approach for helping children (Alfieri et al. 2010).

Although some researchers cite Montessori education as a prime example of playful learning (Diamond and Lee 2011; Elkind 2007; Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2009), others have noted that founder Maria Montessori thought play "developmentally irrelevant" (Rubin, Fein, and Vandenberg 1983, 694). This article, focusing particularly on Maria Montessori's views about pretend play, discusses how Montessori education resembles and does not resemble playful learning. The article then reviews the research on the results of the Montessori style of playful learning.

What is Montessori?

Montessori education began in the early 1900s (Montessori [1912] 1964). The first House of Children (Casa dei Bambini) opened in 1907 and served preschool-aged children in a housing project in Rome. Montessori's method quickly spread to serve different populations of children. In just five years, Montessori classrooms had opened round the world, including an outdoor "classroom" at the University of Virginia (Holsinger, Hebich, and Walters 1976). So impressed

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was Montessori by the transformation of the children in her schools, that despite having expended enormous efforts to become one of the first women in Italy with a medical degree (Povell 2009), she abandoned her career as a doctor and professor. She spent the rest of her life--almost fifty years--developing and refining the Montessori system, extending it for children from birth through age twelve. When she died in 1952, she was developing Montessori methods for adolescents (Montessori [1948] 1976).

Montessori classrooms ideally contain age groupings spanning three years: infant to three years old, three to six, six to nine, and nine to twelve. Working materials, kept on shelves and freely available to the children, are organized into topics such as language, math, and so on. The materials are designed so that if children make mistakes, they can see and correct them without close teacher supervision or intervention. Areas of the curriculum are tightly interconnected. I discuss Montessori education in this article, but the reader can easily find full depictions of the method (Humphryes 1998; Lillard 2005; and Montessori 1967a, 1967b, 1972). For a comparison with other teaching methods like Waldorf and Reggio Emilia, I advise the reader to investigate Carolyn Edwards's excellent "Three Approaches from Europe" (2002). But, before I discuss how Montessori resembles and does not resemble playful learning, I offer three caveats.

First, the descriptions here are of authentic Montessori programs, meaning ones that correspond closely to those Montessori herself described in lectures and those appearing in the training courses of the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI), the organization she founded to carry on her work. Because "Montessori" is not a trademarked term, a variety of schools call themselves Montessori, including ones where children rarely use Montessori materials and some featuring computer-topped desks set in rows. Unfortunately, many visitors to such schools do not realize how far afield these settings are from those Maria Montessori developed or would have endorsed.

Second, some assume Montessori education is expensive and exclusive and therefore unworthy of consideration in discussions about public education. But Montessori education was initially developed for poor children in the slums of Rome, and public schools have implemented Montessori education successfully at lower-than-average costs in low-income districts in such cities as Hartford, Connecticut, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Hartford, Connecticut, public schools in 2010, the average cost per pupil was about $13,000, whereas the cost at the city's Capitol Region Education Council's Montessori Magnet school was $10,500 (Tim Nee, personal communication). Thus, although most

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Montessori schools in the United States are private and mainly serve children whose parents can afford preschool tuition, there is nothing inherent in the system or its costs that restricts it to the well-to-do.

Third, many assume Montessori education is good only for particular (and sometimes contradictory) populations--boys or girls, children with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) or children high in executive function (involving prefrontal activities like working memory, planning, and self-control), gifted children or children with learning disabilities, and so on. I discuss research outcomes at the end of this article, but no research available today indicates that Montessori education suits any one type of child in particular (but see Yen and Ispa 2000). With these considerations in mind, let us move on to Montessori and playful learning.

How Does Montessori Resemble Playful Learning?

Montessori resembles playful learning in several ways (see figure 1), and I discuss each of them.

Overall Structure In a classroom, a daily schedule--with its expectations about what happens when--constitutes one aspect of an overall structure. Another aspect is the level of structure within any given activity. For example, at art time, is drawing free and unstructured or is there a structured assignment with a prescribed set of steps?

Conventional education tends to be less structured in preschool and more tightly structured thereafter, although in recent years, preschools have become more structured in response to the 2001 federal law called No Child Left Behind (Hamre and Pianta 2007; Zigler and Bishop-Josef 2004). The conventional change in education methods for children at age six from looser to more rigid structures corresponds to an uptick in a child's responsibilities and adult expectations at this age across many cultures (Rogoff et al. 1975).

In an educational program that follows the principles of playful learning, the teacher provides structure by guiding the children's learning towards established goals. Children often freely choose their activities, conferring a sense of freedom, but the teacher, however subtly, still leads them. This is true at the level of materials as well: there is some guidance but considerable freedom of choice

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Element of comparison

Provides overall structure Involves objects Involves lessons Freely chosen/ child directed Peer involvement possible Intrinsic, not extrinsic, rewards Fun Structured materials Specific ways to interact with materials

Like playful learning

x x x x x x x

Not like playful learning

x

x x

Description of activity

x

Pretend play

x

Figure 1. How the Montessori method is and is not like playful learning

as the teacher guides the children towards established goals. In terms of overall structure, Montessori education appears to some observ-

ers loose and amorphous and to others, rigid. Montessori education actually falls midway between these characterizations: it embeds freedom within structure and structure within freedom. The overarching principle calls for the child's behavior to be constructive for his or her development--and for the community,

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too. Well-trained Montessori teachers require children to behave in constructive ways. They often ask children who misbehave to stay at their sides, where they can monitor the miscreants closely and, in effect, externally control the misbehavior. Teachers gradually allow the children to move away as the youngsters learn to control themselves and can therefore function more independently. Most children do not need to stand by like this, and those who do rarely need to do so for long. In this sense, then, Montessori education is very structured.

The curriculum presents another structured element of Montessori education. Montessori has a set of lessons and materials for each classroom level, and in any given subject (math or music, for example), the teachers present the materials in a fairly ordered sequence. In Montessori teacher-training courses, teachers walk through the presentation of the materials and the theory underlying them. Within this sequencing of precise lessons with specific materials, children in Montessori programs can choose freely what to do, so it is at this level that Montessori education seems so unstructured. But embedded even here, within that free choice, the work itself remains tightly structured. One can opt to wash a table, but there are specific steps one must follow in doing so. One must carry a mat to a table, lift the table onto the mat, fill a bucket to a specific level with water and add a specific amount of soap, carry the bucket and washing materials to the mat, put a sponge in the water, squeeze out the water with a taught squeezing motion, wipe the table from left to right (replicating the direction needed for writing), dry the table with a towel (from left to right), and so on--all, again, very tightly structured.

Thus, whether one sees Montessori education as loose or rigid depends on the level at which one focuses. If one focuses on the microlevel of table washing, it might seem excessively rigid. If one focuses on the higher level of the freedom children have to choose what they do when and with whom, it seems loose. And, if one focuses on the (at least, in some senses) even higher levels of the curriculum and its expectations for behavior, it seems structured again.

Playful learning, too, is structured in some ways but not in others. Teachers guide learning within structures but do so playfully and loosely, with particular focus on the goals they have in mind. By adhering in some ways but not others to a tight, overall structure, Montessori education resembles playful learning.

The Use of Objects Conventional direct instruction typically lacks any materials that children manipulate to learn. Teachers might illustrate a triangle on a blackboard, for

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example, but not employ a physical triangle. Such instruction is designed for learning through the eyes and ears, not through the hands.

In contrast, playful learning typically involves objects with which children play to learn. Children learning shapes, for example, handle objects of different forms, perhaps tracing the forms with their fingers in addition to seeing them. In this way, playful learning embodies cognition. A wealth of evidence suggests that learning is enhanced when it is embodied across modalities (Barsalou et al. 2003; Lillard, 2005); and there are specific benefits when hands are involved (Beilock and Goldin-Meadow 2010; Lagnado and Sloman 2002; Sobel and Kushnir 2006; Wagner Cook, Kuangyi Yip, and Goldin-Meadow 2010). Using objects to engage children in learning ensures manual involvement. In addition, objectbased learning is active rather than passive, and activity is also associated with better learning (Glenberg et al. 2004). Research on preschool programs in seven countries found that learning involving a variety of manipulable objects fosters cognitive development (Montie, Xiang, and Schweinhart 2006).

Montessori education abounds with objects suited to manipulation in the course of learning. Montessori teacher trainers strongly agree on eighty-three sets of materials a Montessori primary classroom (for three- to six-year-olds) should contain (Lillard 2011a), covering curriculum areas of sensorial (including beginning music instruction), math, language, science and geography, practical life, and art. Montessori teacher trainers have further identified materials suited to classrooms for children in the other age groupings (infants to three-year-olds, for example). Teachers in a Montessori classroom learn during their teacher training how to present the materials used for a particular semiscripted lesson to their students. The Montessori training intends the repeated use of these materials to convey specific learning.

For example, the Wooden Cylinders (see figure 2) involve placing a set of ten graduated cylinders into their appropriate slots in a long wooden base. There are four sets of Wooden Cylinders, varying in width, height, and opposing combinations of height and width. Children play with the set of cylinders varying only in width first because it is most simple both dimensionally and because the pieces are easiest for a young child to pull out. The teacher first gives children a lesson in how to take out all the cylinders, mix them up, and place them into their proper holes. After the teacher presents the task, children are free to play with the Wooden Cylinders on their own. Through this work, three-year-olds focus on dimensional concepts they will later apply in formal mathematics (width, height, volume). They also learn to judge, reason, and act

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on their own decisions (Montessori [1912] 1964). They receive feedback on the adequacy of their decisions from the materials themselves rather than from the teacher: If there is a cylinder-hole mismatch at the end, children know that they mistakenly put too small a cylinder in too large a hole; they need to figure out which one; and they correct the error.

Thus like playful learning, Montessori education involves objects. In Montessori education, those objects are carefully constructed and presented to confer specific learning. The materials in Montessori also typically are self-correcting; in playful learning these latter aspects are not a given. Interactive Lessons Michelene Chi suggests that the best learning comes from contexts that are not just active or constructive (2009), but also interactive. Conventional school lessons are sometimes interactive, sometimes not, depending how many questions

Figure 2. A Montessori student plays with the Wooden Cylinders to learn dimensional concepts she will later apply to studying mathematics. (Photograph by An Vu)

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